Champagne
in France

The great houses of Reims and Épernay are the obvious starting point and worth every minute of the cellar tours that descend into kilometres of chalk caves where the bottles stack in the dark by the million. But the Champagne region rewards those who venture into the vineyards themselves: the Montagne de Reims, the Côte des Blancs, the Vallée de la Marne, where small grower-producers make wines of extraordinary character from plots that have been in the same families for generations. Reims has a Gothic cathedral of the first order and a food scene that takes its role in one of France's great culinary regions seriously. Two hours from Paris by train, it is one of the most undervisited short breaks available from the capital.